For a pilot like me, life doesn't get much better than living on an airpark,
sharing the same hobby, and becoming friends with with all your neighbors. One
of the great things about this is getting together for group flyouts. The only
drawback is that, with one of the slowest airplanes on the field (the Maranda),
we were usually one of the first to leave and the last to arrive. Being a bit
competitive, and disliking the numbness in her more padded regions, Avril
declared that it was time for me to build something faster.

Yikes! Gotta love a wife who TELLS you to go build an airplane.
Needless to say, I didn't protest and immediately commenced a search for an
airplane which would get the two of us to lunch a little faster. Also
included in the criteria was that it should be a proven design and capable of
carrying tent and sleeping bag, so that we could start traveling and seeing some
more of the country. We also wanted something with a reasonable stall speed and
good climb performance; it's a bad feeling to take off high, hot and heavy,
watching the trees at the end of the runway getting closer and closer . . .

Thumbing through the annual Kit Planes directory, it didn't take long to
arrive at the F1 Rocket as being a serious contender for emptying the bank
account. We spoke with Mark Frederick of
Team Rocket at Florida's
Sun n Fun convention and were pretty much sold on the idea that this was the
plane for us.

Conveniently, the factory is located right here in Texas, so one weekend
after our return from Florida, we loaded up the Maranda and flew to Macho Grande
airport to meet with Mark and take our first test rides in a Rocket.

Now that is an experience! Up until now, I had really never flown in a high
performance airplane. I had learned to fly in an 85 hp Luscombe and at 150 hp,
the Maranda was the most powerful airplane I had flown. Flying the Rocket was a
whole different ball game.

I was impressed as the takeoff roll started, pushing me back in the seat. I
thought "Wow, that's pretty impressive acceleration". Then I noticed that the
throttle was only 1/4 of the way in. A few seconds more and I thought "Wow,
that's pretty impressive acceleration." Throttle was still only about 50% of the
way in. By the time the throttle was all the way in, my eyes were bulging and
the drool was streaming back around my ears.

I figured Mark would stay under the 3,000' clouds, as we had coming up. About
3 minutes after takeoff, sitting in the sunshine on top, I could see I was
wrong.

After a bit of flying around, Mark handed over the controls. One of the things I
love most about flying is playing along the edges of cumulus clouds (keeping the
legal separation, of course!). In the Maranda, this means planning ahead
of time to an altitude
in order to go around the clouds. The Rocket offers another option: Pointing at the
nearest cloud, I pulled back on the stick and went Up and OVER the top. Yeee-haaww! This is fun!

All too soon, the test flight was over and it was Avril's turn to go for a
ride. After they had been gone for a while, I could hear the distant sound of
the engine and prepared to videotape the landing. As the Rocket approached the
far end of the runway, it dawned on me that it was going too fast to land. Cool!
an overshoot! As the plane zoomed by and pulled up into the air, the wheels did
a rotation in the viewfinder... as in rotated sideways, up, sideways and down. The
Camcorder did a good job of capturing my "Oh, Boy." This was the first time
Avril had been in an "unusual attitude". I figured there was a 50/50 chance that
she would storm out of the plane, give Mark a thump and cut me off for a month.
I had a couple of minutes to contemplate how much groveling I was going to have
to do, before the plane came to a halt on the pad, and Avril bounded out.
"Wow!", she said, "that was better than sex!".

I wrote a check on the spot.

By the way, if you are with the FAA, please note that I used artistic license
in the above description and nothing should be inferred as having occurred which
should not have occurred. If you are not from the FAA, let's just say I got
lucky that night.

A few months later, we got a call that our kit was ready to be picked up. We
rented a large trailer and drove out to Taylor, Texas, to bring home the newest
member of the family.

Sitting on the floor of the hangar, checking off the parts list, I was
starting to wonder what, again, I had gotten myself into. Surveying the pile of
parts was a bit intimidating. However, this was a quick build kit, so it
couldn't take that long, right? Little did I know.

There's a common joke among builders of just about anything. It goes
something like: double the time and triple the cost. Ha Ha. Very funny. You'd
think by the time I started the project, I would have figured out that it's not
a joke.

Actually, it's not quite as bad as that. At the end, it took a little over
double my original time estimate (whereby I rounded up the factory estimate) and
about 50% more on the cost. Mind you, as of this writing, I haven't finished
adding up the bills, but I kept track of my time and it came to just over 3,000
hours. However, I have been accused by my friends as being anal-retentive (yes,
I think they are my friends), and I did customize a number of things, so the
time could have otherwise been lower.

Overall, I was very impressed with the kit. The workmanship of the finished
parts was excellent. Lots of the parts which are extra cost items on other kits,
were included. Things like air vents and tires. Factory support was excellent
and there is an active builders group. There are also a number of builder
websites out there, which provided a big help on those head-scratching
occasions. I owe beers to people like
Vince Frazier,Randy Pflanzer
and Bob Gross the next time I see
them at a fly-in

One of the areas I spent quite a lot of time on customizing, was on the
instrument panel, which is complete in this picture. During the build, I was spending around 1 1/2 hours
a day commuting to work. All this time spent looking at the instruments in the
car got me to thinking that it ought to be possible to build something
similar in the airplane - at least, something beyond just the simple
piece of aluminum with lots of round and square holes drilled in it. I wanted
to have the panel as simple and clean as possible, and wanted to have a kind of
3-D effect, with the monitor and idiot lights located under a smoked plexiglass
screen. Although you can't see everything in this picture (that's the idea of
the smoked plexiglass), there is a roll trim indicator at the top, a pitch trim
indicator on the right side and idiot lights across the bottom and up the left
hand side for things like pitot heat indication, canopy latch, etc.

In keeping with the "clean lines" concept, the switches were located under a
door on the right side of the cockpit, and the fuses hidden under a door
beneath. After a lot of fiddling with cardboard and aluminum templates, a
fairing emerged to cover up the throttle quadrant and EFIS controls on the left.

I had
decided early in the process that I wanted to build a glass panel and did not
want to have any traditional aircraft instruments. Some people think that's a
bad idea, but I think most of the potential failure modes have been addressed.
There are two electrical busses on the airplane and two alternators. The EFIS is
driven automatically by either a dedicated EFIS battery or by the main aircraft
battery, whichever is online. The passenger's monitor is secured with a pin
which can be pulled, so if the pilot's monitor was to fail, it is possible to
reach around, grab the passenger's monitor and put it in the pilot's lap.

If the EFIS box itself should fail, then there are two options:

1) Pull off the F1 logo on the side of the panel to reveal a steam guage
airspeed indicator (shhh . . . don't tell anyone), and pull out the $2.49
suction-cup compass from the storage locker under the left floorboard. This
works for VFR flight. Or:

2) Swing the Garmin 496 out from behind the panel on the right side.
Actually, this option doesn't exist yet; the bracketry is there, but as of this
writing, it hasn't been installed. However, once it is in place, it will provide
GPS-driven backup for groundspeed, heading, altitude, etc. It also has it's own
antenna and own power source, making it completely independent from all of the
other aircraft systems.

I decided to go with a Blue Mountain EFIS One. As of summer 2006, it has
about 65 hours on it and so far, I think it was the right decision. It took me a
little while to adapt to the different display (actually, I'm still adapting to
the entire airplane, never mind the display), but after a few hours I decided
that I really like it and then I later decided that I like it a lot. It provides
fantastic situational awareness, it's very intuitive and active monitoring of
all the parameters means that if anything goes out of limits, you know about it
immediately. For example, each alternator has an ammeter on it, so in
the event of alternator failure, you don't have to wait until the voltage drops
and then wait until the pilot notices it; the system will provide an
instantaneous notification at the moment of failure, in the form of a popup-up
box with flashing red font. With an all-electric panel, this is a pretty useful
feature. Another feature which I have really started to appreciate is the fact
that all flight data is recorded every 5 seconds, so you can download all of the
flight and engine parameters to a laptop after the flight. This makes it very
easy to identify which cylinder peaks first when leaning and makes the process
of balancing injectors much more precise. It also makes it easy to see the
impact of any changes, like tweaks to the cooling system or streamlining
fairings.

On the performance front, it's a blast!
I have not been able to equal the factory-claimed climb performance of 3,500
feet per minute, but I'm usually between 500 and 1,000' above ground by the time
I get to the end of our 3,000' airstrip, so who's counting? Cruise speed depends
on how much fuel you want to burn. Normal cruise for me is about 215 mph true
airspeed, at around 11.5 gph. As of this writing, I'm still working on balancing
the injectors, so the fuel consumption might come down a bit once I can start to
run lean of peak. The airplane is much easier to land than either the Maranda or
the Luscombe and is much more tolerant of cross winds and gusty conditions. At
cruise, it is solid and rides through bumps much more smoothly than what I am
used to, thanks to the higher wing loading. It will take off in about 300 feet
and land in about double that.

We're looking forward to doing some more traveling, now that I'll have some free
time outside the hangar. Getting an Instrument pilot's rating is pretty high on
the list of things to do.

Hopefully I'll have some traveling stories to write soon.

Is it better than sex? Maybe not better - but it's a close second, and the
Rocket never has a headache!

Update: July 2007 - Fun and Paint

After almost a hundred hours of operation, we decided it was time to stop
flying naked.

Although we weren't looking forward to the months of downtime

that a paint job would entail, it just didn't seem right to keep flying the Rocket with
an unfinished look, and I didn't relish the work that would be needed to keep
the bare aluminum bright and shiny in southern Texas. We spent hours thinking of
different paint schemes and even hired a local artist to help us flesh out some
ideas. Finally, we thought we had something close and that's when we met Raymond
at Big Red Customs.

We went through several more designs with Raymond until one day we went to
his shop and he showed us a sample plate with his latest idea for our plane.
Immediately, we knew we had it. Using the style from his template, the rest of
the design process went quickly and a few weeks later, Raymond, his crew and
equipment arrived at our hangar. Using bulldog clips, they hung dropsheets from
the rafters, put dropsheets on the floor and set up a ventilation fan at one end
to exhaust the fumes out the door.

I was quite surprised to come home one day and find all of the parts were
black. As it turns out, black is the best color to use for primer when you are
spraying a silver base coat. I guess that's why they call them professionals - I
never would have thought of using black.

We used a base coat/clear coat system, with PPG brand paints. HVLP guns were
used to keep the overspray down. I think in the end, the job took longer than
any of us estimated - the crew was on site for most of about 6 weeks, but they
held to their original estimate for the cost of the work and I am very pleased
with the final result. In fact, Raymond went out of his way to add extra
touches. Like, when we decided that we would not put the registration across the
back of the tail, which left a large, open canvas on which Raymond airbrushed
the "F1" logo that Avril designed. He did all this at no extra cost.
Unfortunately, Raymond's talents have been in high demand since he did our plane
and I have heard from other friends who have approached him that he has not had
time to work on their planes. However, if you are in the Houston area and are
looking for a great job - and can find him when he is not going flat out - you
might be able to persuade him to do another.

We now have about 150 hours on the plane. I love it. It is a huge amount of
fun to fly. It's a very different kind of flying from what I am used to; you can
pretty much just point it where you want to go, and it goes there. If you don't
want to go around a cloud, you can pull back on the stick and go over top. On a
recent cross country, we were purring along in the bright sunshine at 8,500
feet. Conditions were smooth as silk and the clouds beneath us were sliding by
at well over 200 mph. A great tune was on the mp3 player and I remarked to
Avril: "It doesn't get much better than this". She definitely agreed.

I am now working on an IFR ticket and we hope to be making a lot of weekend
trips around the country in the months and years to come. The only problem is
that, now that it's finished, the building bug has started nibbling again. I'm
not sure what will be next. Maybe something that lands on the water . . .